While many agencies prioritize viral content metrics, ZeroTo1 takes a different approach: transforming influencer communities into measurable revenue channels. 

As companies seek tangible results from creator collaborations, Riley Cronin, president and co-founder, has developed a framework helping leading brands like Instacart, HexClad, and Lowe’s convert their creator partnerships from expenses into profit centers.

Building Performance Through Community

Riley’s vision for ZeroTo1 emerged from his experience on the founding team at Shipt, where he established the company’s influencer department during its growth to a half-billion-dollar acquisition by Target. Throughout his six-year tenure, one challenge persisted: finding an agency partner capable of matching their expansion pace.

“We worked with over 20 different agencies. We were there for six years, and we never found the right agency to scale or grow with us,” Riley recalls. “We wanted to build the agency we wish we had while Shipt was scaling.”

“We grew fast, and it was just frustrating always to have to churn through many agency partners,” Riley says of the origins of ZeroTo1’s emphasis on relationships.

“We were fortunate that we cut our teeth at building an influencer strategy at Shipt,” he says. “The company’s ethos and core values, one of our main core values, were building relationships or focusing on the relationship or building community. And we took that with us when we built ZeroTo1.”

Riley believes ZeroTo1’s success stems from its people-first approach to driving results. “Our biggest X factor differentiator is our community-focused approach,” he says. “If you’re building an affiliate program, you’re looking for hundreds or thousands of influencers to join. But outside of just the transaction, it starts with the relationship.”

“We want to work smarter and not harder, and we’re always looking; we get on the phone with an influencer anytime we build a relationship. We’re looking for ways to add value,” Riley explains.

“We want to make it easier for them to be successful, and we also want to see how much opportunity we can create for those influencers,” Riley states. 

“We found that if we can make influencers successful not just with one brand, but multiple brands, it builds such good relationships with them, and we just see much more value provided across multiple of our clients,” he adds.

This approach manifests in what Riley calls “scaling the unscalable.” 

“I get why agencies or brands struggle with it,” he elaborates. “It’s one of those things that sometimes feels unscalable, but you do have to find a way to scale that unscalable thing because it can make or break your program. They’re humans at the end of the day. They want to be seen, they want to be valued for the work that they’ve done, and they also want to have a relationship with you.”

ZeroTo1 offers two primary services:

1. Influencer Affiliate Communities: Developing large-scale ambassador programs where creators produce content in exchange for product seeding and commission structures
2. TikTok Shop Management: Comprehensive management of creator communities driving sales within TikTok

For both services, Riley highlights proper channel investment. “One of the misconceptions on the brand side is this is a channel, and you do need to invest in the channel if you want it to be successful.”

“Most often, you can’t just focus on recruiting an affiliate to create content and have that scale your program,” he adds. “It comes down to keeping your shop health score in a good spot, your merchandising strategy, being willing to pay for top affiliates, and having a solid media buying strategy to put paid spend behind top content.”

TikTok Shop’s Strategic Advantage

Riley identifies significant potential in TikTok Shop’s streamlined approach for creators and consumers.

“With TikTok Shop, you eliminate all of the things that must be piecemealed together to make that community function,” he explains. “If there’s any friction in them being able to join and start creating content so they could start earning money, it’s going to be hard to make that a successful program.”

“When you’re talking about recruiting a creator(s) to produce content, and they only get paid when a transaction happens, with the way it’s been done historically, there’s just a lot of software and processes and things that have to come together to make that work,” Riley notes.

“With TikTok Shop, you eliminate all of that. It’s the same thing on the customer side – for them to just be on the platform, be scrolling, see a product they like, and be able to purchase it right there. It eliminates friction on both sides.”

Cultivating Long-Term Creator Partnerships

The agency partners primarily with high-growth e-commerce retail or tech companies generating $100 million in revenue across food and beverage, retail, and health and fitness supplements.

“We don’t focus on a specific category, but we love to work with category leaders or category disruptors, like brands that we enjoy consuming or that we would enjoy working with or doing marketing for,” Riley shares.

Riley emphasizes sustainable creator relationships for partnership success. 

“The brands that are winning right now are not just looking to recruit affiliates on a performance basis,” he notes. “They are partnering with a smaller group of high-quality creators, partnering with them over a longer-term basis, three or six months, and having them produce more content.”

Data-Informed Creator Selection

ZeroTo1’s approach begins with comprehensive brand assessments to develop creator profiles.

“Anytime we partner with a brand, we go through a very in-depth audit of who they are and who their audience is, and we use that information to come up with an archetype or the type of influencers that we think are going to be successful in their program,” Riley explains.

They use tools like FastMoss to analyze GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) data and success patterns.

“The best indicator of if someone is going to drive sales or GMV for your program is if they’ve done that if they have a track record or history of doing that successfully for other brands that may be in a parallel category,” Riley explains. “From there, we also use tools like FastMoss to look at GMV driven by affiliates. That’s very helpful data.”

The agency implements AI to enhance its selection process.

“We use AI to support many pieces of our flywheel process, all the way from the influencers we recruit or source,” Riley shares. “The tools that we use have an AI feature, one of them being a lookalike audience where we can put influencers that have performed well for us and use their lookalike AI tool to recommend creators similar to that creator list.”

For emerging creators, Riley advises consistency and relationship-building: “If you’re a creator that’s just starting, I would have the mindset of wanting to give more than I receive, and I would be more willing just to get at bats. Partner with affiliate programs that resonate with my audience or the one I’m trying to build…”

“The more content you create, the better you get,” he adds. “The better you get, the bigger audience that you build over time.”

He highlights the importance of unique content formats: “What is a big opportunity, regardless of the size of the creator right now, is having your franchisable content series, as we like to call it. [The series] doesn’t necessarily have to be promotional, but your audience should be able to grab hold of and follow along, and then you can find brands that would fit best into it.”

Measuring Impact Through Multiple Metrics

For creators, key performance indicators include:

1. Content production volume: “The worst thing that you could have when you’re building an influencer affiliate community or TikTok Shop strategy is churn, meaning you do all this work to get a creator involved, and they either never create content or they only create one piece of content and never create content again.”
2. Conversions/GMV generated: “How many sales are they driving from the content they’re creating, or how much GMV is being driven?”
3. Quality of “whitelistable” content for paid media: “Is the content, even if it hasn’t driven organic sales yet, quality enough content that could support them on the media buying side and support the client?”

For brands, profitability leads to metrics. “They’re looking to make not just revenue but to have this be a profitable channel for them,” Riley explains. “Sometimes, that could be LTV to CAC, and sometimes, it can just be total ROAS of how much they’ve invested into the community and how much revenue it’s driving.”

ZeroTo1 maintains dedicated community managers for each client account who provide ongoing feedback and coaching to creators.

“Their job is to use social listening to see content coming in, reach out to those creators as content comes in to coach them, encourage them to create more content, inspire them to create more content, and just give them feedback on where they’re at from a performance perspective,” Riley shares.

The Future of Creator Marketing

Riley sees creator partnerships becoming increasingly vital to marketing success. Since his time at Shipt, he recognized that most agencies focused solely on awareness metrics, missing opportunities for bottom-funnel performance.

For brands and creators focusing on sustainable success, Riley states: “Do not forget the relationship aspect of influencer marketing. The better you can build relationships, get on the phone, learn about your influencers, and be close with them, the more successful partnerships you’ll have, which will translate into better results.”

“When you’re working with creators, always look to get as much value out of every creator partnership,” he concludes. “The brands that do the best job look at their creator community as a community and find as many ways to provide value to those creators, but also extract as much value to support their entire marketing funnel.”